Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

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on Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 at 12:20 pm and is filed under LD #35.
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One Response to “Ludum dare team up?”

Having discovered Stencyl for the first time last weekend, as part of a team in a game jam… please, learn something else. Stencyl is absolutely horrible, ESPECIALLY in a team setup.

Heck, even Game Maker 4.2a (the last fully free version?) fares better, as it actually has useful functions and doesn’t give you RSI just trying to add two numbers together. Plus it has faster compile times and IIRC it can actually import and export things, a feature badly missing from Stencyl.

Problems with Stencyl:

* The compile times are painfully slow. Haxe gives reasonable compile speeds after the initial compile, but the initial compile is slow, and Stencyl does an initial compile every single time. There is no way to change this.
* Several important “basic” functions – for instance, getting the direction towards an actor – are missing.
* You cannot “fork and merge” the game, so it is completely impractical in a team setting.
* The API is undocumented, so if you use Haxe directly, there’s a lot of trial and error. Which means more compiling. Which means more delays.
* HTML5 export was experimental, and tended to not only be buggy but also slow compared with the Flash export.
* Flash export is the only other option you have with the free version of Stencyl, and that in itself is also slow.
* And of course, if you decide not to use Haxe directly, the act of clicking and dragging everything is notably more cumbersome than actually typing it out.

The only way Stencyl will work in your case is like so:

* You must be the only one writing code.
* You must be the only one putting levels together.
* You must be the only one importing assets and ensuring that they all animate OK.

I’ll be using Löve2D, because it actually works, and because you can develop in a short timeframe with it. If you would like to experience what Lua looks like when it’s written by someone who actually understands the damn language, then please join me (prod me on IRC – I’m using the name “greaser|q”).